Abraham Attempts to Kill Son, Son and Wife's Opinions Not Mentioned

A Feminist Approach to Genesis 22

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The NRSVUE Genesis 22 reading is as follows:

After these things God tested Abraham. He said to him, “Abraham!” And he said, “Here I am.” ² He said, “Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains that I shall show you.” ³ So Abraham rose early in the morning, saddled his donkey, and took two of his young men with him and his son Isaac; he cut the wood for the burnt offering and set out and went to the place in the distance that God had shown him. ⁴ On the third day Abraham looked up and saw the place far away. ⁵ Then Abraham said to his young men, “Stay here with the donkey; the boy and I will go over there; we will worship, and then we will come back to you.” ⁶ Abraham took the wood of the burnt offering and laid it on his son Isaac, and he himself carried the fire and the knife. And the two of them walked on together. ⁷ Isaac said to his father Abraham, “Father!” And he said, “Here I am, my son.” He said, “The fire and the wood are here, but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?” ⁸ Abraham said, “God himself will provide the lamb for a burnt offering, my son.” And the two of them walked on together.

⁹ When they came to the place that God had shown him, Abraham built an altar there and laid the wood in order. He bound his son Isaac and laid him on the altar on top of the wood. ¹⁰ Then Abraham reached out his hand and took the knife to kill^[a] his son. ¹¹ But the angel of the Lord called to him from heaven and said, “Abraham, Abraham!” And he said, “Here I am.” ¹² He said, “Do not lay your hand on the boy or do anything to him, for now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me.” ¹³ And Abraham looked up and saw a ram, caught in a thicket by its horns. Abraham went and took the ram and offered it up as a burnt offering instead of his son. ¹⁴ So Abraham called that place “The Lord will provide,”^[b] as it is said to this day, “On the mount of the Lord it shall be provided.”^[c]

¹⁵ The angel of the Lord called to Abraham a second time from heaven ¹⁶ and said, “By myself I have sworn, says the Lord: Because you have done this, and have not withheld your son, your only son, ¹⁷ I will indeed bless you, and I will make your offspring as numerous as the stars of heaven and as the sand that is on the seashore. And your offspring shall possess the gate of their enemies, ¹⁸ and by your offspring shall all the nations of the earth gain blessing for themselves, because you have obeyed my voice.” ¹⁹ So Abraham returned to his young men, and they arose and went together to Beer-sheba, and Abraham lived at Beer-sheba.

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This story from the book of Genesis is a tough passage to wrap our heads around. God commands Abraham to sacrifice his son, a boy, and Abraham accepts and follows through with it almost to the end no questions asked. He stops when the angel intervenes. Then God’s angel effectively says ‘Hey, now that God knows that you fear Him, you’ll be blessed. Here’s that covenant repeated to you for the fifth time in 5 chapters.” Like, hey, psyche. The whole filicide thing was a test.

Isaac has one speaking part when he points out that there is no lamb for the sacrifice, and his father is just like, ‘Yeah, well. God will provide the lamb’, aka it’s gonna be you, son. We do not know if Isaac was gagged when he was bound and placed on the altar. We do not know if Isaac begs for his life, or if his silence implies his own obedience to his father, Abraham.

This story is all about Abraham, but honestly, a large chunk of the Hebrew Bible is all about Abraham. That’s the point.

This is not the first time Abraham makes a familial sacrifice of some sort. Abraham tasks his wife, Sarah, to lie twice to different foreign leaders to say that they are siblings so that Abraham isn’t killed [Gen 12:10-20, Gen 20:1-14]. The cost of that, is that Sarah is essentially prostituted out by her husband to save his own skin, and God intervenes twice to prevent the horrific from happening to Sarah.

Then, Abraham sleeps with Hagar, Sarah’s slave, and they conceive Ishmael. Sarah is not thrilled with the pregnancy, and harasses Hagar until Hagar runs away. When Hagar returns, Sarah tells Abraham to ostracize Hagar, which Abraham obliges [Gen 16, 21:8-21].

At this point, we know Abraham is totally down to toss women, including pregnant women, out the door for his own gain. And now, we have Abraham tying up his son to sacrifice Isaac on the basis of a command from God. Abraham shows no remorse, no debate, no questions. Strange, considering Abraham asked a lot of questions to God over the fate of Sodom [Gen 18:16-33].

I have to ask, in the silence of Isaac as he is about to be a sacrifice, where is Sarah? Why did God only come to Abraham and command Abraham to sacrifice the son that Sarah and Abraham prayed for? The miracle of Isaac’s birth is that Sarah and Abraham are old, Sarah is barren. Now God is out here testing Abraham’s faith by asking him to kill their miracle son.

But Sarah is nowhere to be found. She is not included in this test; we don’t know where Sarah is. Sarah is relegated as a plot ploy: a womb and vessel to carry Isaac, the jealous barren elderly woman who gets her husband to sleep withHagar, and produce the firstborn, only to ostracize Hagar and her son once Isaac is born.

We see that Sarah is honored with a proper burial in Gen 23, but it’s in her death that we see Abraham truly honor her. We don’t even know if Abraham told his wife that he almost killed their son together that day. We don’t know if Isaac told his mother that his dad tried to kill him in the name of the Lord.

One can argue that the point of the Hebrew Bible’s story of Abraham is that it’s all about Abraham, that the context was a patriarchal world where God spares and redeems Sarah and Hagar while creating the plot line for Abraham’s seed to bring forth the covenant of great nations.

We focus on Abraham’s obedience, while forgetting that Sarah obeyed her husband when he prostituted her, that Hagar returned to Abraham after she was sex-trafficked on God’s command, that Isaac was silent as he was bound as a sacrifice, while the firstborn bastard, Ishmael, is cast out in the desert learning how to shoot bow and arrow [Gen 21].

We can hype up Abraham all day long, but let us not forget about everyone else who had to sacrifice their sense of safety, family, and livelihood so that Abraham can be the star of the show.

Ishmael’s story advances so that he becomes the Father of Arabs and the early lineage to Mohammad. Ishmael is a key figure in the Islamic faith.

The men are the ones who attain glory, while the women are silenced, ostracized, and used as a vessel over and over. The covenant was with Abraham, but everyone else was involved, too, with little glory.

The women aren’t considered martyrs since none of them died, we can consider them as sacrificial lambs of the plot line.

It’s all about men.

Cover photo: Small Stories from a Big God